Introduction
"Alabama Zack" is a 40-chapter science fiction serial, published in the Scholar and Scribe community once a week on Wednesdays.
You can start the serial from the beginning by visiting the Curated Collection.
Previously in our story
Alabama Zack, our hero and a war veteran, found himself standing on a train station platform in another time and dimension. At his feet lay a man in a brown suit. The man was dead, and Zack was arrested and jailed for murder.
Zack has amnesia: he can not remember how he arrived on that platform, let alone whether or not he had anything to do with the man's death.
Zack has met three people who are helping him to recover his memory and prove his innocence: the doctor, whom Zack met on the train station platform, the P.I. Cork McGraw, and Cork's maid Matilda.
In recent chapters, Matilda and Zack reunited in a barn on the Clayton ranch, after Matilda dimension-jumped from Cork's burning office building, which the Claytons had set on fire. The doctor had seen Matilda jump safely, but he and Cork had no idea where she had gone. They decided to attempt to find her using the doctor's transporter device, which meant traveling to the inquisitors' cave. As they left town, the pair met Mr. Clayton, who trained a shotgun on them. The doctor was shot while Cork tried to disarm Mr. Clayton.
Cork heaved the unconscious Mr. Clayton over the horse's withers like a sack of potatoes.
Clayton would live, though Cork had given him quite a beating. The doctor was dead, shot through the heart when Cork had grabbed Clayton's rifle. Cork went to his friend and knelt beside him. He had already closed the doc's eyes and tilted his brown fedora over his still face. The blood that had saturated his suit coat and shirt was beginning to crust in the midday sun.
With his hand on the doctor's shoulder, Cork looked down the row of backyards toward his shed and smoking office. A few of the constables looked around on the ground floor, while others gathered in the street out front. They hadn't made it into the backyard yet, but Cork was wary of going back to the shed. He didn't know how he was going to bury the doctor without a shovel. Then he looked into the field on his left and saw the piles of gravel – and he knew where his friend would rest.
He hoisted the doctor's corpse in his arms and carried it to the nearest rock pile. The body was supple but already cold. He laid it behind the pile and folded the legs so that it was hidden from the buildings and the street. The doctor's fedora had fallen off; he went back for it and placed it next to the body. He looked at his friend's smooth face, then scooped the gravel in huge armfuls and covered him up.
When he was finished, he saw that the covering was too thin. A bit of the doctor's suit coat showed through in one spot. He walked to the next pile and carried handful after handful back to the grave, until he felt the doctor was safely buried – now oblivious to the fact that he was exposed in the open field. When the pile was deep enough he hunted around and found three smooth stones and placed them in a triangle on top of the pile. He took off his hat and brushed the dust from his coat and hands.
He stood there listening to the moment. Clayton's horse ripped grass in one of the backyards. Something fell in his burned-out office. The constables exclaimed to each other, and Cork snapped back to the situation at hand. “Well, doc,” he said, and he put his cowboy hat back on and tugged the brim.
Cork collected the horse and mounted up. He thought that Matilda was in some foreign dimension, and that she might need his help. The inquisitors had a transporter – the only one he knew of – and he thought they had Zack too. It seemed the cave was still the place to go.
There he would figure out some way to help the friends he still could.
“I'll take that damn place by force if I have to,” he said, and he wheeled the horse around northward, toward the train tracks.
Next week in our story
On the viewing platform, three inquisitors sat around a small table. They were bundled up against the sunlight to protect their pale skin. Their hoods were pulled up to shade their bald heads, and mauve wrappings covered their hands and feet – wound carefully around each finger and each toe – but they still wore their open-toed sandals. Instead of looking outward, into the world, they looked into the center of the table at a translucent sphere that hung there like a soap bubble, ...
Chapter XXXIII (link to come)
Start at the beginning
Cover for “Alabama Zack” designed in Canva using a Pixabay photo as background (image source).
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